Time Warped Read Online Free PDF

time decelerate this drastically? There is a more radical explanation – is it possible that the way the brain actually measures time could make it feel as though it slows down? If the brain counts time by monitoring its own processes, when it moves extra fast in an emergency this could cause it to count more beats and to believe that more time has passed. So while the brain is racing to save itself, so is its clock. I’ll come back to this in the next chapter. Before that there are other curious factors that distort time. The life-threatening, mind-racing moments of intense concentration are not the only occasions when time decelerates. The opposite – having nothing on which to fix your mind – in other words sheer boredom – has a similar, though less extreme effect, as do a series of other experiences.
    NOT THE KINDEST OF EXPERIMENTS
    You arrive to take part in a study. You know it is to take place in the psychology department, but not what it involves.There are five other participants, all wearing name-tags. Everyone seems friendly, if a little unsure of what might be about to happen. The woman in charge says that first you should get to know each other and she gives you a list of topics to discuss, among them the place you would most like to visit in the world, your most embarrassing experience and what you would choose if you could have one magic wish. Soon you’re happily exchanging tales of humiliating incidents, like the time you got an electric hot-brush stuck in your hair on the way to a wedding and had to walk along the street with the flex hanging down from your head (this happened to me). The psychologist says you will be working in pairs and, to make things go smoothly, you should write down the names of the two people from the group with whom you would prefer to work. That’s easy. You hand in your form and wait to see who you’ll be paired with. But when they call you in for your turn they look rather embarrassed and say that no one has put you down as someone they’d like to work with. They say that in all the studies they’ve been running, this is so unusual that they think it best for you to work on the tasks alone. You’re a bit surprised, and – if you’re honest – hurt, but you try to tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter what a group of strangers thinks of you and that you didn’t particularly like them anyway. You’re determined not to show anyone that you’re upset and to do the tasks as well as you can. For the first task, they start a stopwatch, then stop it and ask you to guess how much time has passed.
    While you sit alone wondering why no one likes you, what you don’t realise is that every other member of thegroup has also been taken aside to separate rooms to work alone, but while half were given the same explanation they gave you, others were told they must work on they own because they had been chosen by everyone, making it difficult to allocate partners fairly. A harsh experiment you might think, although not as bad as a study later in the same series where they tell you that the results of your personality questionnaire indicate that although you might marry several times, none of your relationships will last and you are likely to spend your old age alone. I should add at this point that after all experiments like this participants are debriefed and told it’s all a fiction.
    The intriguing result of this rejection study is that the belief that a few strangers dislike you can alter your time perception. The people who were told they were popular estimated the 40 second test as lasting an average of 42.5 seconds, while the rejected group came out with an average of 63.6 seconds. 9 Although 20 seconds might not sound like much, the fact that there was a difference is quite extraordinary. The rejection had made them painfully aware of everything happening in the present. Their misery had stretched time.
    This research on rejection and time perception stemmed from